From Baseball to Book Tour

As a kid, Susan Perabo’s
zeal for baseball was borderline fanatical. Writing in a recent
blog post for Yahoo! Sports, the professor of English and
writer-in-residence recalls the breathlessness that signaled the annual release
of a new set of baseball cards—a thrill that intensified the year after her
beloved Cardinals captured the World Series in 1982—and her memory of
inadvertently becoming the first person to show then-rookie Willie McGee a
baseball card bearing his image.

It was, she writes, the moment McGee knew he’d arrived, a
milestone she’d come to appreciate years later, after making her own mark.

Born in St. Louis, Mo., Perabo played softball in high
school and honed her undergrad writing chops at her hometown college, Webster
University. Webster didn’t have a softball program, so she played backup second
base with the guys, becoming the first woman to play on an NCAA baseball team. That
distinction earned Perabo a plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

She went on to earn a spot in the prestigious MFA in
creative writing program at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and published
her first short story soon after her arrival—a moment of sweet retribution, since
the same work had been brutally critiqued in a workshop just a few weeks before.
Perabo earned her MFA in 1995 and joined Dickinson’s English department the
following year.

At Dickinson, Perabo is a professor of English, a former
departmental head and mentor to the Belles Lettres Literary Society. She has published three books
and anthologized work in Best American
Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, New Stories from the South and For the Love of Baseball, and her fiction
and nonfiction also has appeared in Story, Glimmer
Train, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review and The Sun magazine.

Perabo’s work found wide
readership in 1999, when she published her first short-story collection,
Who I Was Supposed to Be. Dubbed by The New York Times as “reminiscent of
Raymond Carver’s [prose] with a sensibility that’s informed by People magazine,” it was named 1999 Book
of the Year by theLos Angeles Times, Miami Herald and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Her 2001 novel, The Broken Places,followed,
taking her powerhouse storytelling and complex characterizations to new ground.
A new book, released by Simon & Schuster this month, brings the author back
into short-story form.

Perspectives, old and new

Described as “darkly beautiful” and “suffused with
astonishing wit and tenderness” (novelist Jenny Offill) and “reminiscent of
George Saunders … ingenious and lovable stories” (Kirkus Reviews), Why They Run the Way They Do dishes up
richly layered tales, by turns wry and moving,
about ordinary lives, touched by the bizarre. Perabo introduces an
impressive assortment of narrators—male and female, young and old, plain-spoken
and artful. Each is in crisis, but none is entirely without hope.

It’s the product of 15 years’ work—the oldest story was
penned when Perabo’s teenage son was an infant; the newest was crafted last
year, while she served as director of Dickinson’s study abroad program in Norwich,
England. Perabo recently embarked on a book tour, a literary rediscovery of those past life phases and perspectives—at one stop, she might revisit a story she
wrote while serving as department chair, or at another, the year her daughter was
born.

These works are decidedly fictional, though colleagues and
loved ones might catch a familiar droll turn of phrase, or a whisper of
Perabos they recognize—educator, sister, parent, dog lover, friend, baseball
fiend. And for Perabo’s students, like class of 2016 members Amelia Valentino
(history) and Samantha Bellissimo (English), who got to know Perabo outside of class while studying in
Norwich last year, the book’s very existence shines interesting new
light.

“We’re a little starstruck, seeing her in her role as an
author,” said Valentino, who joined a standing-room-only crowd at Perabo’s Feb.
16 book tour launch at the Whistlestop Bookshop.
“We were talking about how it’s so strange to see her signing books, like a
celebrity.”

“It’s amazing that we get to write with her in class,” added
Bellissimo.